In the information technology world, standard protocols have long been developed to monitor and interface with various hardware products, including printers, scanners, backup drives, servers, and so forth. From one point on the network, a network operator may run diagnostics, use and modify the configuration of any one of these devices or many of them at once. However, in other industries, interfaces are proprietary and require specific cables and equipment or specific code or instructions, whether on the computer or a printed page, to be executed as provided by the manufacturer and and which do not interface with other technologies. Medical equipment operations, such as operating, running tests on, or configuring MRI and CAT scan machines, require an individual user interacting with a proprietary interface. Medical equipment operations are generally autonomous. Each silo of operations places heavy dependency on the equipment's manufacturer to provide the management as part of the maintenance contract. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) use proprietary hardware interfaces, diagnostic software tools, communication protocols, etc., and the OEMs are not willing to release any specification, application protocol interface (API), or software development kit (SDK) to allow 3rd-party integration. As such, the medical equipment silos continue to operate as black-boxes, and only OEM-supplied tools can be used to monitor specific medical equipment in service. This practice is slow to change because the manufacturers do not want it to, as they can capitalize on services revenue; and customers do not know how to, because there is no off-the-shelf product on the market as alternative to the manufacturers' offerings.
The challenge of establishing a standard capability to monitor and interface with medical equipment and any other equipment with only proprietary interfaces is that there is no standardized and consistent method for accessing, navigating, analyzing, and diagnosing issues on such equipment.
What is needed in the art of hardware equipment is a common scheme for interfacing with proprietary hardware. The need for a technology that can universally interface with all OEM's proprietary hardware and software, creating a standardized proactive monitoring platform to manage hardware equipment across the board has been long felt and is unsolved.